History Of Mother’s Day From UMC Book Of Worship
Mother’s Day began in its present form with a special service in May 1907 at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia. The service was organized by a Methodist laywoman, Anna Jarvis, to honor her mother, who had died on May 9, 1905. By 1908 Anna Jarvis was advocating that all mothers be honored on the second Sunday in May, and in 1912 the Methodist Episcopal Church recognized the day and raised it to the national agenda. It has some parallels with the old English Mothering Sunday in mid–Lent, which focused on returning home and paying homage to one's mother, and with Mother's Day for Peace, introduced in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe in Boston as a day dedicated to peace.
